Migrants take risky journeys to escape ‘poverty, hunger, insecurity’

Mohammed Ali Malek (C, in white), one of two survivors of Saturday's migrant boat disaster, later arrested on suspicion of people trafficking, is seen watching bodies of dead migrants being disembarked from the Italian coastguard ship Bruno Gregoretti in Senglea in Valletta's Grand Harbour April 20, 2015 (Reuters / Darrin Zammit Lupi) / Reuters

People are desperate to escape from the warzones in Syria or Libya where they are facing a profound hunger, Zina Aga, Iraqi Palestinian writer who lost a cousin as he attempted to flee Syria by boat told RT.

RT:EU leaders intend to re-establish
government authority in Libya in an effort to halt migrants from
taking the deadly journey in the first place. What’s your
reaction to that proposal?

Zina Aga: On the one hand, I think we live in
the 21st century: [if] we can get man on the moon, we can help a
fellow man who is absolutely desperate. This sort of situation is
a poor reflection on humanity. Secondly, I feel like borders is
something that we created, and it is not up to us to decide who
can come and who can go and play god with people lives like this.
That is my initial reaction seeing the events.

RT:What could be a solution?

ZA: It is very complicated. There is a
humanitarian solution and there is a political solution. In terms
of the humanitarianism we need to prioritize human life. The way
we’re dealing with this at the moment is very cruel, very
barbaric. We need to realize that those dying are vulnerable
people and such a massacre shouldn’t be an afterthought, it
should be the first reaction.

But on a political level we need to reassess the structures that
mean these people are desperate, and why they are leaving to
begin with, we need to reassess our policy with Libya, Syria, and
Sub-Saharan Africa, and those sorts of countries that are dealing
with profound structural problems, and address Europe’s role in
it, and why these people feel the need to come to Europe to begin
with. When we address these fundamental issues everything else
will flow out of it.

RT:The number of migrants trying to reach
EU shores is spiking, obviously something needs to be done to cap
the numbers. But the flow of migrants from North Africa to Europe
became far greater after 2011, after the military intervention in
Libya. How fair is it to connect this with immigration to
Europe?

ZA: It seems like quite a causal link. One
should be very wary when trying to glorify everything that came
before... Make no mistake Gaddafi’s regime was a brutal one, but
what happened since, in a similar way it happened in Iraq, a lack
of infrastructure, a lack of sort of recovery, and the
consequences of that are just a sort of chaos which leaves
vulnerable people, normal people like us without any other choice
apart from to look further afield for safety and security.

I do think that the spike obviously is related to growing unrest
in the region, in the Middle East and North Africa. It is
something that we shouldn’t isolate as separate events; they are
definitely linked in a profound way. It is worth addressing of
policy towards them as the West, but also addressing what to do
on a human level.

RT:You lost a cousin who was trying to
escape Syria. Could you share with our audience why do you think
people take such dangerous risk?

ZA: Poverty, hunger, insecurity - the worst of
humanity, especially in Syria. I was there in 2011, and to
compare the image of that right at the beginning of the Arab
spring: the food, the happiness that people had right in the
beginning compared to what is happening now and a profound
hunger. You can understand why people choose to take these
journeys. The most tragic part about it is that we isolate this
incidents, we think about the war in Syria as something
disconnected to us but immigration and integration as such that
something happens in Syria will have a reverberation over here.
For instance, me having this interview is case in point. We need
to think about these issues in terms of a bit more laterally
perhaps, and to think the situation in Syria with all of its
brutality has instigated this sort of reaction.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.